Call For Papers

With the increasing automation of business processes, growing amounts of process data become available. This opens new research opportunities for business process data analysis, mining and modeling. The aim of the IFIP 2.6 International Symposium on Data-Driven Process Discovery and Analysis is to offer a forum where researchers from different communities and the industry can share their insight in this hot new field.
The Symposium will feature a number of keynotes illustrating advanced approaches, shorter presentations on recent research, a competitive PhD seminar and selected research and industrial demonstrations. This year the symposium will be held in Graz.

## Call for Papers
The IFIP International Symposium on Data-Driven Process Discovery and Analysis (SIMPDA 2016) offers a unique opportunity to present new approaches and research results to researchers and practitioners working in business process data modelling, representation and privacy-aware analysis.
The symposium will bring together leading researchers, engineers and scientists from around the world. Full papers must not exceed 15 pages. Short papers are limited to at most 4 pages. All papers must be original contributions, not previously published or under review for publication elsewhere. All contributions must be written in English and must follow the LNCS Springer Verlag format. Templates can be downloaded from: http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html
Accepted papers will be published in a pre-proceeding volume of CEUR workshop series. The authors of the accepted papers will be invited to submit extended articles to a post-symposium proceedings volume which will be published in the LNBIP series (Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, http://www.springer.com/series/7911), scheduled for late 2017 (extended papers length will be between 7000 and 9000 words). Around 10-15 papers will be selected for publication after a second round of review.

### Topics
Topics of interest for submission include, but are not limited to:

### Workshop Format:
In accordance to our historical tradition of proposing SIMPDA as a symposium, we propose an innovative format for this workshop:
The number of sessions depend on the number of submissions but, considering the previous editions, we envisage to have four sessions, with 4-5 related papers assigned to each session. A special session (with a specific review process) will be dedicated to discuss research plan from PhD students.
Papers are pre-circulated to the authors that will be expected to read all papers in advance but to avoid exceptional overhead, two are assigned to be prepared with particular care, making ready comments and suggestions.
The bulk of the time during each session will be dedicated to open conversations about all of the papers in a given session, along with any linkages to the papers and discussions within an earlier session.
The closing session (30 minutes), will include a panel about open challenges during which every participant will be asked to assemble their thoughts/project ideas/goals/etc… that they got out of the workshop.

### Call for PhD Research Plans
The SIMPDA PhD Seminar is a workshop for Ph.D. students from all over the world. The goal of the Seminar is to help students with their thesis and research plans by providing feedback and general advice on how to use their research results.
Students interested in participating in the Seminar should submit an extended abstract describing their research. Submissions can relate to any aspect of Process Data: technical advances, usage and impact studies, policy analyses, social and institutional implications, theoretical contributions, interaction and design advances, innovative applications, and social implications.

Research plans should be at most of 5 page long and should be organised following the following structure:

* Abstract: summarises, in 5 line, the research aims and significance.
* Research Question: defines what will be accomplished by eliciting the relevant the research questions.
* Background: defines the background knowledge providing the 5 most relevant references (papers or books).
* Significance: explains the relevance of the general topic and of the specific contribution.
* Research design and methods: describes and motivates the method adopted focusing on: assumptions, solutions, data sources, validation of results, limitations of the approach.
* Research stage: describes what the student has done so far.

### SIMPDA PhD award
A doctoral award will be given by the SIMPDA PhD Jury to the best research plan submitted.
Student Scholarships
An application for a limited number of scholarships aimed at students coming from emerging countries has been submitted to IFIP.
In order to apply, please contact paolo.ceravolo@unimi.it

### CALL for Demonstrations and Posters
Demonstrations showcase innovative technology and applications, allowing for sharing research work directly with colleagues in a high-visibility setting. Demonstration proposals should consist of a title, an extended abstract, and contact information for the authors, and should not exceed 10 pages.
Posters allow the presentation of late-breaking results in an informal, interactive manner. Poster proposals should consist of a title, an extended abstract, contact information for the authors, and should not exceed 2 pages.
Accepted demonstrations and posters will be presented at the symposium. Abstracts will appear in the proceedings.

Even though the vision of paperless offices is still largely an utopia, a large number of processes have already been digitalised in recent years. While this shift was traditionally driven by the usage of, e.g., enterprise resource planning (ERP) or customer relationship management (CRM) systems, it increasingly moves into more lightweight and less formal contexts. Increasing smartphone adoption, fast and affordable internet access across the globe and investments in the Internet of Things, to only name a few development we currently see, will only accelerate this development.
Thus, challenges like the effective discovery of ad-hoc processes, their subsequent execution, and the analysis of the resulting artefacts across systems will need to be addressed. This keynote gives a different perspective on the aforementioned issues by drawing parallels to promising approaches that try to tackle similar problems at web-scale.

SIMPDA was proposed in 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 by IFIP WG 2.6 and 2.12/12.4 as the International Symposium on Data-Driven Process Discovery and Analysis.
The symposium had around 30 attendees in 2011 and 20 in 2012. It featured a number of keynotes illustrating new approaches, shorter presentations on recent research, and a competitive PhD seminar, together with selected research and industrial demonstrations. The authors of the accepted papers have been invited to submit extended articles to a post-symposium proceedings volume published in the Springer LNBIP series.
Several events and activities arose off these symposia, among the most notables we have two Dagstuhl seminars: